I've been a rails dev for over a decade... love the framework and the language. About a year ago we started a client project where they had a fractional CTO that wanted to do the API & UI in typescript and so we settled on Nest.JS... tl;dr Nest is about as good of and opinionated of a framework as I've seen in Node land, but it definitely has it's edges:
- ORM: Like another commenter said, the ORM landscape in the node/typescript world is lacking. Every project feels like it's 70% complete and while you can find a project for each feature you want, you can't find one project with all of them. Ended up with TypeORM which has been very meh.
- AuthZ: We went with casl which has a very similar feel to cancancan but lacks many of the important features for implementing more complex authz patterns like "you can edit this if you are in the group that owns this item"
- Testing: Using Jest but the DSL and setup/teardown is way more complicated than rspec.
- Flexibility. Patterns like single table inheritance and polymorphic relationships are poorly supported/fully lacking in typeorm and this bit us.
- Learning curve: the DI system in Nest had a long learning curve, and having to sift through half a dozen or more options for each critical package (ORM, AuthN, AuthZ, etc) instead of having 1 or 2 clear choices made getting the project off the ground much much slower than anticipated. This can also just be chalked up to being green to the Node API landscape.
- Adding to the learning curve, you have to be much more thoughtful about your code organization and architecture. We have an issue where we've introduced circular coupling through db-level repositories that is very hard to untangle. Rails gives you a great standard to work from that will take you a long ways
All in all it wasn't a terrible experience but the complexity of the domain lead to some challenges that we could have probably solve more elegantly and quickly in Rails. Even after a year of working the in project, I'd say my velocity for medium/simple tasks is still only 80% of what it is in Rails. Definitely lower when more complicated features are involved
- ORM: Like another commenter said, the ORM landscape in the node/typescript world is lacking. Every project feels like it's 70% complete and while you can find a project for each feature you want, you can't find one project with all of them. Ended up with TypeORM which has been very meh. - AuthZ: We went with casl which has a very similar feel to cancancan but lacks many of the important features for implementing more complex authz patterns like "you can edit this if you are in the group that owns this item" - Testing: Using Jest but the DSL and setup/teardown is way more complicated than rspec. - Flexibility. Patterns like single table inheritance and polymorphic relationships are poorly supported/fully lacking in typeorm and this bit us. - Learning curve: the DI system in Nest had a long learning curve, and having to sift through half a dozen or more options for each critical package (ORM, AuthN, AuthZ, etc) instead of having 1 or 2 clear choices made getting the project off the ground much much slower than anticipated. This can also just be chalked up to being green to the Node API landscape. - Adding to the learning curve, you have to be much more thoughtful about your code organization and architecture. We have an issue where we've introduced circular coupling through db-level repositories that is very hard to untangle. Rails gives you a great standard to work from that will take you a long ways
All in all it wasn't a terrible experience but the complexity of the domain lead to some challenges that we could have probably solve more elegantly and quickly in Rails. Even after a year of working the in project, I'd say my velocity for medium/simple tasks is still only 80% of what it is in Rails. Definitely lower when more complicated features are involved